About the project

The Endo/Exo Writers Project analyzes the representation of poverty and class in American and British long-form writing published between 1840 and 1940. This research builds on a forthcoming monograph by Lennard Davis that describes different literary patterns based on the authors’ economic background: Endo writers portray the class to which they belong, whereas Exo authors describe the poor from the perspective of the middle class. More rarely, proletarian authors have viewed the middle classes through the eyes of the poor. One of our initial research hypotheses holds that narratives written by middle-class or upper-class authors show a focus on violence, drug use, urban decay, or other living conditions that are, in comparison, largely absent from working-class writing.

Drawing on available literary histories and bibliographies, we have so far compiled a database that collects metadata on fifty Endo and fifty Exo novels, autobiographies, and story collections. This database is currently being used to construct a full-text corpus with the help of existing repositories like the Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg. Texts that aren’t yet accessible will be digitized, and we aim to make the full corpus available on this site as soon as possible. In addition to making these resources available to interested scholars, the site will offer visualizations of the metadata, sample analyses of the full texts, and further information on selected authors.